Best practices for deploying target audiences

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These best practices provide tips, recommendations, and examples to supplement the instructions for the 3 primary steps you’ll follow to deploy a target audience.

For an overview of target audiences, see About target audiences.

When creating a target audience

  • Use a name that succinctly describes the membership of the target audience—The name can also help you identify which organizational unit or configuration group the audience is applied to. For example, if you’re creating an audience for your sales team on the East coast and the team is in an organizational unit named "Sales - East Coast," you might want to use that name for the target audience.
  • Describe the purpose of the target audience—The description helps users choose the right level of sharing. When sharing a file or link, users see the description when they point to the name of an audience.

Learn more about creating a target audience.

Best practices for adding members & managing groups

Add groups instead of individual users as members

Although target audiences help users share with specific people, they're intended to encourage broad sharing and collaboration in your organization. We recommend adding groups, such as for a department or larger team, as members rather than individual users. You can add any type of group as a member of a target audience, including groups you create in the Google Admin console, with APIs or another tool, groups users create, and groups created outside of your organization

 Consider how non-admin groups affect security & privacy

If you add non-admin groups as members of a target audience, membership of user-created or external groups can change at any time. For example, if you let users add external members to their groups, people outside of your organization might be granted access to files shared with the target audience. Before adding a non-admin group, consider whether it might affect the security or privacy of your organization's data.

Learn more about adding or removing target audience members.

Automatically update group membership

If your Google Workspace edition includes dynamic groups, you can use them to automatically manage users. For example, you can automatically update membership in groups when users join, move within, or leave your organization. Available in the Admin console or with the Cloud Identity API, dynamic groups help you reduce time spent managing group membership manually. Learn more about dynamic groups.

Keep groups secure

You can convert a standard internal group to a security group, which helps you regulate, audit, and monitor the group for permission and access control. Security groups are available with the Cloud Identity Groups API. Learn more about security groups.

Easily manage & sync groups 

Use the Admin SDK Groups API to create groups or manage groups that you create with other tools. You can also use Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS) to sync groups that you create in Microsoft Active Directory or an LDAP server with Google Workspace. Then, use those synced groups “as is" in target audiences. Learn more about Admin SDK Groups API and GCDS.

Best practices for applying a target audience

You can apply up to 5 target audiences to a Drive and Docs policy. Set the target audience that you want users to use most often, the primary audience—that is, the default link-sharing option that appears when a user opens their link-sharing options.

By default, a pre-defined audience, which includes all users in your organization, is the primary audience. To make an audience, you create the default option for users, and drag it to the top position in the list of audiences:

For details, see Set target audiences for a Google service.

Common deployment examples

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